Would Mother Nature pass a Health and Safety inspection? we think not
I don't know who this guy is, or whether he's right about mitochrondrial replacement therapy, but this strikes me as spot-on:
"[N]ormal" sexual reproduction, a very dangerous activity indeed [is] one often described as a "genetic lottery". Human reproduction involves genes being recklessly combined, sometimes literally, but always figuratively in the dark, with unforeseeable consequences for the resulting children and generations.
An estimated 7.9 million children - 6% of total births worldwide - are born with a serious defect of genetic or partially genetic origin. Many hundreds of thousands more are born with serious defects that are caused after conception, including maternal exposure to environmental agents such as drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. It is doubtful that natural sexual reproduction, with its risk of sexually transmitted disease, its high abnormality rate in the resulting children and its gross inefficiency in terms of the death and destruction of embryos, would ever have been approved by regulatory bodies if it had been invented as a reproductive technology rather than simply "found" as part of our evolved biology.
Like really, so many 'natural' or 'traditional' technologies and practices - were coal to be a suddenly discovered energy resource rather than one in use from 'time immemorial', would there not be furores far greater than those around windfarms about the detrimental environmental impact? See also, the societal ills caused by legal substances such as tobacco and alcohol.
I have heretofore mooted the argument that, even if the design was originally intelligent, it was put out to a pack of cowboy contractors who made a thoroughly bodged-up job of it, and possibly had the plans wrong way up even if they could read them.
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